


A Father's Wish

by nerdzeword



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-30
Updated: 2015-10-30
Packaged: 2018-04-28 21:05:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5105714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdzeword/pseuds/nerdzeword
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every father has high hopes for their child.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Father's Wish

**Author's Note:**

> I actually wrote this weeks ago, but forgot to post it. Oops.   
> As always I don't own the characters. Enjoy!

Richard watched his daughter bounce as she waited for the train. Walking through the wall to get to the platform had been rather strange, but then again, his Hermione had never been what others might have considered normal. He just prayed that he and Helen were doing the right thing in sending her to Hogwarts. He wondered if the students there would accept her, she had never been a rather sociable child. And she had inherited her parents’ need to show off. He hoped that didn’t impede her ability to make friends.

He hugged her close and whispered his goodbyes and I love you’s in her ear before finally releasing his little girl into a wonderful new world. One he would never be able to follow her to. He thought though, as he watched her little skips and bright smile, that it would one day be worth it.

 

Hermione had not sent nearly as many letters as they would have liked, and so by the time she had made it back home, they had been dying to hear about her year at school. She was more than happy to oblige. She told them of her classes, and her professors, and her late night adventures, and her friends. She mentioned her friends a lot. Richard wasn’t too pleased about these friends of hers, because they seemed to get her in trouble a lot. Plus they were boys, and that didn’t sit well with him. All boys grew up sometime. He would know.

One pointed look from Helen, however, and he opted not to say anything.

He discovered something else was at play behind her stories, when they accompanied her to Diagon Alley for school supplies. They met her friends, and Richard was even less impressed with them, neither boy had even bothered to introduce themselves. And he had had a really hard time not laughing at the questions Mr. Weasley had asked he and his wife to answer. It was as if the Wizards in his daughter’s world opted to pretend that over half of the earth’s population didn’t even exist. And the few that did recognize their existence, looked at them as if they were some sort of primitive creature, who’s junk was studied for archeological purposes.

And then the Malfoys had arrived. Richard couldn’t quite understand what the issue was between the boy’s father, and Mr. Weasley, but there was no mistaking the look of longing in the boy’s eyes, and Helen had spent hours consoling him afterwards, telling him that it was merely a crush, and there was no way their precious Hermione would ever give a snobby little boy like that a second glance.

But late at night, after his wife had fallen asleep, Richard found he wasn’t so sure. Wasn’t that, after all, the look he gave his own wife?

 

The Grangers had planned an epic adventure in Paris for their holiday that summer. The mood was mostly dampened, however, by the knowledge that Hermione was worried about her friend Harry, whom, she had later explained, had a terrible home life living with his horrible relatives. Richard felt sorry for the lad, but not enough to follow up on Helen’s suggestion that they invite him to stay with them over the summers. He would let the boy visit, but staying the entire summer with his daughter was more than he could handle.

Despite her obvious preoccupation with her friend, however, Richard thought she had fun. There were times though, when she would shrink back into herself, and he thought she might not be telling him everything that was going on at school, and he wished he could be there with her while she was in such an unfamiliar world. He eventually offered to get her an animal companion to keep her company in the unfamiliar world.

Richard was not pleased when he discovered that not only would Hermione’s visit with them be cut short, because of some sports tournament that he could tell she didn’t actually give a lick about, but also because for the first time, his little girl wouldn’t be home for Christmas.

 

When Helen passed in the spring of Hermione’s fourth year, he opted not to contact her. Let her have a few more months of childhood, he thought. Hermione’s sullen attitude when he went to pick her up from the train station was his first hint that something was wrong. He hadn’t even told her about her mother yet.

It was the hardest thing Richard had ever done. How did one tell one’s only child that her mother had died in a car crash while she was at school? It took him two weeks to get her to stop bursting into tears, and another week after that for her to tell him what was really wrong.

Richard was alarmed at the amount she had kept hidden from him. He found himself becoming more and more angry at the amount of pain that the wizarding world had allowed to inflict of his little girl, and even her friends. He may not have liked the boys, but no one deserved to go through a sports tournament without their own consent, let alone his guardian’s consent. He was angered at the thoughtless accusations that her own friends had sent her way the year before, when she’d only been trying to help. And the explanation that there was a killer on the loose outraged him. Why had no one done anything to stop it? Why was a fourteen year old boy now a target? He had wanted to pull her out of school right there.

‘We can move away.’ He said. ‘Find a different wizarding school for you to go to. There had to be more right?’ She just shook her head no. She had to stay, she had to help Harry and Ron and the Order. She was going to change things in the wizarding world, and she needed to stay put in order to do that.

Richard had never felt more proud, or more afraid, for his daughter than he did in that moment. So he agreed. He never had been able to deny her anything. And he no longer had Helen to keep him in line. Hermione’s thoughts seemed to follow the same pattern and she burst into tears again. Stuttering about how she wished her mum were there because she could have help her understand her feelings about some ‘boy stuff’ and that he just wouldn’t understand the same way. And how she just missed her mummy.

His heart broke for his little girl, who had endured so much, and had so much more yet to endure before this was all over. So he did what he had always done. He held her in his arms and rocked her to sleep, and prayed that she have someone to look after her and keep her safe because he knew he couldn’t. Not in her world. Not even in his own.

 

When she returned home before her sixth year, she was cut up and scared. The first thing she blurted out was ‘I didn’t tell them. I couldn’t.’ Richard just took her in his arms and let her cry all of the pent up tears. It was hard holding in tears for that long. Grief was never easy when you had no one to cry on. She told him that she did have someone though. But he had as much going on as Harry and she didn’t want to burden him. Richard only nodded in understanding. Hadn’t he hoped to protect her from the same thing once?

He told her that she could burden him. He may not understand, but it couldn’t hurt to talk about it. So she did. She told him stories of the horrors that were being inflicted on innocents and the fear and pain that was being caused throughout the entire wizarding world.

In turn, he told her he was thinking about selling the practice. It reminded him too much of her mum. And they began to plan. ‘Harry has a mission.’ She told him. ‘And I have to help him. I probably won’t be back next summer.’ Richard wondered what mission a fifteen year old boy could possibly have, but he knew that his daughter was smart enough to keep them all safe. So despite his better judgement, he went along with it all.

‘What do you have in mind?’

A year later, he would be in Australia, under a different name, with only a fleeting memory of a girl with wild brown curls as dark as her mother’s hazelnut eyes.

 

When he saw his little girl again, she was standing in his living room staring at him, biting her lip nervously. He held out his arms for a hug, and she burst into tears. He didn’t get to ask what she’d gone through until later however, because the little boy he had seen looking at her with such longing all those years ago was standing in the corner, patiently watching them. He too held the stance of one who had been hunted and hurt, all traces of his former arrogance gone along with his childhood.

‘This is Draco.’ she told him. ‘He’s the one I didn’t want to burden.’ Richard only nodded and led them to the kitchen for some tea. His little girl was all grown up now and he had missed it all. She told him of the war, and how she had lived in the woods for months with her two best friends. Both he and Draco frowned at those stories, to which she rolled her eyes and laughed. ‘I don’t know why you don’t like them daddy. They’re perfectly nice boys.’ to which he only replied that they had hurt her. She argued that she liked Draco and he had hurt her too. He countered that Draco hadn’t been her friend. Him turning his back on her would never have hurt her as much as her friends turning her back on her did. ‘What if,’ he asked her, ‘Draco told you right now that he no longer liked you because you’d had his broom taken away?’ She replied that she’d be heartbroken.

Draco cut in and told her that what Richard was trying to say was that friends and loved ones should be held at higher standards than strangers. ‘You expect your friends to treat you with respect and to take care of you.’ Hermione had made an outraged noise. ‘Or at least have your back.’ He amended.  She nodded slowly. Richard could tell that she still didn’t understand. But that was okay, he could tell from one look that she had Draco to look after her now. Richard questioned him as to how he and Hermione came to be.

He replied that Ron had said something that brought her to tears after the Yule Ball in Hermione’s fourth year, and he had gone to comfort her, and they’d become friends. Richard nodded, thinking that Helen would have gushed and thought is was a terribly romantic story. And perhaps it was, perhaps these two broken kids were meant to find each other amongst a war, perhaps they were meant to overcome it together.

Maybe they were meant to be together, but Richard still thought that no one would ever be worthy of his daughter’s love. She was too good. Too pure. She had given up everything for a world that gave her nothing but pain in return, who could ever come close to matching that sacrifice? Hermione went on to tell him about how Draco had spied for the Order in secret for years, just to give up the secret in a blaze of glory, when he refused to leave Hermione’s side in the final battle, eventually taking a spell for her that left him in intensive care in the hospital for nearly three months.

Richard thought that maybe he did understand sacrifice after all.

Hermione continued, telling him how, while Draco was in the hospital, she started writing a stack of laws prohibiting the mistreatment of muggleborns, and giving them equal rights to the rest of wizarding society. Richard thought that his daughter may be the smartest witch alive. Draco informed him with a hint of pride in his own voice that she was considered ‘the brightest witch of her age’ then he smirked at Hermione and commented on how it wasn’t hard since the only other witches her age were ones like Pansy and Lavender. She punched him in the shoulder but laughed anyway.

Richard smiled, but wondered why all of the girls in her year were named after flowers. And as he watched the years roll off of his daughter in waves, and the worry lines in her face fade away as she laughed and joked with the boy she had once hated. Richard wondered if his Helen was watching them too.

‘She made it love. She made it home.’ He whispered to the wind in the open window. And he thought that maybe he could be happy again, just so long as his baby girl had someone to look after her and keep her safe in that cruel dark world out there. Wasn’t that, after all, every father’s wish?


End file.
